Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend

206 Pages·2010·1.11 MB·English

by  Mark Collins Jenkins

VAMPIRE FORENSICS
VAMPIRE FORENSICS
UNCOVERING THE ORIGINS OF AN ENDURING LEGEND
MARK COLLINS JENKINS
Published by the National Geographic Society
1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Copyright © 2009 Mark Collins Jenkins. All rights reserved. Reproduction of
the whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the
publisher is prohibited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Mark, 1960 July 12-
Vampire forensics: uncovering the origins of an enduring legend / Mark
Collins Jenkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-42620666-5
1. Vampires. 2. Forensic sciences. I. Title.
GR830.V3J44 2010
398’.45--dc22
2009044631
The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s largest nonprofit
scientific and educational organizations. Founded in 1888 to “increase and
diffuse geographic knowledge,” the Society works to inspire people to care
about the planet. It reaches more than 325 million people worldwide each month
through its official journal, National Geographic, and other magazines; National
Geographic Channel; television documentaries; music; radio; films; books;
DVDs; maps; exhibitions; school publishing programs; interactive media; and
merchandise. National Geographic has funded more than 9,000 scientific
research, conservation and exploration projects and supports an education
program combating geographic illiteracy.
For more information, please call 1-800-NGS LINE (647-5463) or write to the
following address: National Geographic Society
1145 17th Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036-4688 U.S.A.
Visit us online at www.nationalgeographic.com
For rights or permissions inquiries, please contact National Geographic Books
Subsidiary Rights: [email protected]
C
ONTENTS
A V V , 2006
AMPIRE IN ENICE
T Z
WILIGHT ONE
“T V B S D ”
HE ERY EST TORY OF IABLERIE
G G
ATHERINGS FROM RAVEYARDS
T V E
HE AMPIRE PIDEMICS
C M
ORPI ORTI
T D
ERRA AMNATA
T W
HE ANDERERS
T W D
ALES OF ORLDWIDE EVILRY
T L
HE ARVAE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
A V V , 2006
AMPIRE IN ENICE
L S —“the Most Serene Republic”—is how we like to think of Venice,
A ERENISSIMA
as she was during her golden age. The crumbling palaces, arched bridges, and
exuberant churches topped by domes and campaniles all rise from that
shimmering lagoon like mirages from the past. This is the Venice of our dreams.
And like all dreams, that Venice was an illusion. Today a World Heritage
site, the Queen of the Adriatic attracts millions of tourists each year. Yet few of
them cross the sparkling waters and visit Lazzaretto Nuovo Island, with its old
quarantine station, high-walled hospital, and cemetery heaped with the bones of
16th-and 17th-century plague victims. Life had not always been serene in La
Serenissima, as Dr. Matteo Borrini understood only too well. While directing an
excavation of that cemetery in 2006, the forensic anthropologist had become
puzzled by one broken skeleton in particular. Why, he wondered, had someone
four centuries ago thrust a brick between its jaws? His quest for an answer,
supported by a 2009 grant from the National Geographic Society, led him to
uncover the legend of the “chewing dead,” plague-causing vampires stopped
only by ramming stones or bricks in their mouths.
They are but one of the many species that have arisen from the long,
evolving history of vampires. Follow their wandering tracks, and you will wend
ever deeper into the nightmarish mazes of our most remote past.
C O
HAPTER NE
T Z
WILIGHT ONE
Y There in the gathering twilight he stands, caped and fanged and
OU OPEN THE DOOR.
glowering. In the streets behind him, spectral legions are on the move. It’s
Halloween, and the visitor on your doorstep must be all of six years old.
Vampire chic—it’s everywhere. It’s cool to be one, and certainly cool to love
one, judging from the popularity of a certain number-one best seller that ends
with the heroine wishing to become a vampire like her boyfriend. Now that
they’ve come out of the coffin, so to speak, vampires have never appeared more
sensitive or romantic. They have never been more heroic. And they have never
been portrayed more sympathetically. One is wickedly reminded of something
Dr. Lewis Thomas once wrote about biological parasites: “[T]here is nothing to
be gained, in an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause illness and death.
Pathogenicity may be something…more frightening to them than us.”
American popular culture is in the midst of a vampire epidemic that has sunk
its fangs into fashion, film, television, and publishing. Vampire trappings—pallid
complexions, eyeliner, dark clothing—have outgrown their origins in the Goth
look and crossed into the mainstream. The vampire is the “new James Dean,” no
less a cultural arbiter than the New York Times pronounced on July 2, 2009. And
on Sunday nights, admittedly after the family hour, millions of television
viewers curl up for the latest installment of vampire mayhem set in the bayous of
Louisiana as HBO broadcasts its decidedly Grand Guignol series, True Blood.
It’s all irresistibly good fun. As folklorist Michael Bell once put it, “What
better food for the imagination than a creature that incorporates sex, blood,
violence, shapeshifting, superhuman power, and eternal life?”
Yet it is also a bewildering maze, a hall of mirrors in which—as, upon
reflection, you’d expect—the original vampire is hard to see. Take Dracula: You
can’t find the porter for the baggage. As the Irish Times related when the novel
of that name, written by its native son, was selected as the Dublin: One City, One
Book choice for 2009:
He’s advertised throat lozenges, cat food, insecticide, pizza, security systems
(“protects you against uninvited guests”), and many other products. He has been
a breakfast cereal—Choculas. In the 170-odd movies in which Dracula was
featured as a main or lesser character, he has been black (Blacula, 1972), deaf
(Deafula, 1975, the first-ever “signed” film), gay (Dragula, 1973), a porn star
(Spermula, 1976), and senile (John Carradine keeping his teeth in a glass by the
side of the bed in Nocturna, 1978). He has met Billy the Kid, Abbott and
Costello, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and the Outer Space Chicks.
Nor can we forget Bunnicula, the vampire rabbit who sucks plant juices, and
Vampirella, the redoubtable comic-book heroine of the planet Draculon, where
all the rivers once ran with blood. Dracula himself, in altered form, has even had
his own comic-book adventures: Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula and Dracula Lives
turned the Transylvanian count into a kind of reverse superhero, impossible to
kill or to keep down; at one point in his Marvelous escapades, the cartoon
Dracula marshals a vampire army on the moon and launches his minions like
missiles at Earth—all the while sporting his trademark evening clothes and cape.
At least there he was recognizably evil. In Fred Saberhagen’s novel The
Dracula Tape, he is not only more sinned against than sinning; he’s not even
guilty. The death and damage the main character wreaks in the original novel is
instead laid at Abraham Van Helsing’s feet; in Saberhagen’s sympathetic
reimagining, the stubborn vampire slayer is so deluded by superstition that he,
not Dracula, leaves a trail of disaster behind him.
The vampire also enjoys a special prestige in the pantheon of ghouls. Given
the choice, says Peter Nicholls, editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
it’s better to be a vampire than a werewolf or a zombie:
Vampires are aristocratic, drinking only the most refined substances, usually
blood. In the iconography of horror, the vampire stands for sex. The werewolf,
who stands for instability, shapeshifting, lack of self-control, is middle-class and
lives in a dog-eat-dog world. The zombie or ghoul, who shambles and rots, is
working-class, inarticulate, dangerous, deprived, wishing only to feed on those
who are better off; in the iconography of horror the zombie stands for the
exploited worker.
The vampire, who started life like that shambling zombie, has climbed the
social ladder. In fact, he has pulled a very neat switch. Once the epitome of
corruptible death, he has become a symbol of life—of life lived more intensely,
more glamorously, and more wantonly, with bites having become kisses, than
what passes for life on this side of the curtain. Add to that a practical immortality
if you behave yourself, and one can appreciate the temptation always dangling
before the Sookies and the Bellas and the Buffys to cross the line. In Chelsea
Quinn Yarbro’s Hotel Transylvania, the very human Madelaine spells out the
vampire appeal: “To know your freedom. To live in the blood that is taken with
love…I can hardly wait!”
Such characters are on the verge of deliberately choosing a fate their
fictional ancestors would have considered abhorrent beyond all imagining. It’s
not just the old high-school romance given a new edge. It’s not always rooted in
the yearning to escape the strictures of society and convention. It also reflects a
darker, more profound disenchantment, as Yarbro’s Madelaine explains to her
undead lover:
In my reading of history there is war and ruin and pillage and lives snuffled out
with such profligacy that my breath is stopped by the senselessness of it. One
would think that all humanity had nothing better than to feed on its own carrion.
I have thought as I read these books, how many worse things there are in this
world than vampires.
It wasn’t always that way. Vampires certainly have evolved—to the point
where it is now difficult, but still tantalizingly possible, to catch a glimpse of
their terrible origins.
N S
ATURAL AND UPERNATURAL
Dracula may still hold court as king of the undead, but his reign is nearing its
end, thanks largely to the explosion of competing vampire epics since the 1970s.
Those curious enough to trace the circuitous path by which the vampire arrived
at his present mainstream status must survey these fictional worlds: By pushing
the old fiend in new directions, they will reveal much about his origins.
Dozens of modern sagas are out there, each attractively packaged and each
boasting its own ardent fan base. The offerings differ as radically from one
another as Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series (aka True Blood)
distinguishes itself from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, or as both of those
are set apart from the 20 volumes (and counting) of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s
Saint-Germain epic, named for the enigmatic 18th-century French count and